


Jin and the Beanstalk

by notaverse



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, M/M, uke!Jin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-01
Updated: 2011-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-24 05:53:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaverse/pseuds/notaverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jin didn't expect to find his <i>biggest</i> fan living at the top of a giant beanstalk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jin and the Beanstalk

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Jin and the Beanstalk  
>  **Pairing:** Kame x Jin  
>  **Rating:** R  
>  **Genre/Warnings:** Fairytale fluff  
>  **Notes:** kizuna_exchange (2011) fic for prologuesized, very loosely based on 'Jack and the Beanstalk'.

"She was no good for you anyway," Yamapi said, handing Jin the last clean spoon in their apartment so he could indulge in his usual post-break-up ice cream binge. "She didn't like my music."

"How does that make her no good for _me_?"

"She obviously didn't have any taste at all." Yamapi was nothing if not a supportive roommate to his best friend. "If she did, she wouldn't have ditched you for that American guy."

"I think he's won Oscars," Jin said glumly. "It was no contest."

He popped the lid on the only tub of ice cream to survive last Saturday's party, a thick, swirly chocolate concoction loaded with enough calories to make his doctor weep, and prepared to dig in. He frowned when his spoon scraped the bottom of the container.

"This just isn't my day."

It wasn't his week, really. On Monday he'd tripped over his baggy jeans while trying to show off for his new choreographer. Tuesday their airconditioning went on the fritz and they still couldn't get anyone to take a look at it. Wednesday Mika had dragged him to some stuffy industry party where everyone spoke English far fancier than anything he knew and he'd spent the entire night propping up the bar with some male model, who kept hitting on him in French. On Thursday his manager called him up and told him it wasn't a good idea to be seen out and about with gay French models, in case it damaged his reputation. (Not that Jin had much of a reputation left to damage.) Friday he finally got to see the costumes for his latest PV, and had to assume they'd hired someone who hated his guts to design them.

And now, on Saturday, he'd had the shortest breakfast date in history. He just counted himself lucky Mika hadn't dumped the remains of her coffee in his lap after she'd broken up with him.

"We're out of ice cream?" Yamapi sounded horrified.

Jin considered the state of the tub. "I think we can maybe get a couple of spoonfuls each out of it."

"You've got the last clean spoon." The dishes tended to suffer whenever Jin's life took a turn for the worse. "It's the middle of summer and we have no aircon. We need to restock."

"Whose turn is it to get groceries this week?"

"Yours." Yamapi grabbed the latest shopping list - a sorry-looking scrap of paper on which they'd taken it in turns to scribble down items as they thought of them - and set it on the table to add 'ice cream' to the list. "And try not to go overboard this time. Our freezer's not that big."

"I'll take it easy," Jin promised. He hoped getting out of the apartment for a bit and doing something mundane would make him feel better. He and Mika hadn't been dating long but he'd thought things were going pretty well. Apparently he wasn't qualified to judge. "Are you going out tonight?"

Yamapi shook his head. "I promised my sister I'd help her look at cars tomorrow. I won't be much help if I fall asleep during a test drive. You should come with. We'll have fun."

As far as Jin was concerned, his best friend's family and his own were more or less interchangeable which meant he really would be welcome on the excursion, but somehow he didn't think he'd be in the mood for joking around with his friends. "Maybe."

He shoved the list in his pocket, grabbed his wallet and keys, and made for the door. Somewhere out there was a tub of Cookies & Cream with his name on it.

\-----

By the time he returned home with the groceries, Jin felt somewhat cheerier. Part of this was down to his having run into a friend at the supermarket, who'd told him - in the strictest confidence, of course - that the actor at whom his ex-girlfriend was planning to throw herself would never be interested in anyone who didn't have a Y chromosome. The rest of it might've been a sugar high from the block of fudge he'd snaffled on his way round. Free samples were one of the more pleasurable consequences of being an idol.

Yamapi emerged from the latest in a series of cold showers he'd been taking since their airconditioning started to go, just in time to give Jin a hand putting away the shopping. The first bag made him laugh. The second bag made him smile indulgently.

But when he hit the third bag and realised the ones Jin was putting away were no better, he couldn't keep quiet.

"Did you get anything that was on the list at all?"

"Sure I did." Jin held up a bottle of washing-up liquid. "Now we can have clean spoons again!"

"I meant the food, Jin. We're out of eggs, rice, bread...about a million other things. All I'm seeing in these bags is junk."

"I got eggs! Uh...somewhere in here." Jin rummaged frantically through the remaining bags, wondering how he'd gotten so sidetracked in the store. "And the rice is...um..."

Yamapi was a lot more diligent about eating healthily than Jin, whose appetites varied with his moods - and right now he wasn't in the mood for anything remotely good for him. He had enough American DVD boxsets and junk food to keep him going for at least a week, though he'd have to leave the apartment on Tuesday anyway to shoot the PV.

"You didn't get any real food at all, did you?"

"Uh..." In the last bag Jin came up with a handful of beans the weird old guy sitting outside the supermarket had given him - the only free sample he hadn't tried then and there. "I've got these?" he tried, giving Yamapi an optimistic smile.

It didn't work. Yamapi stormed across the kitchen, snatched the beans from Jin's hand and threw them out the open window. "I'm going out to get us something that won't kill us with a sugar overdose," he said, and vanished before Jin could protest.

\-----

Jin knew his best friend well enough to be sure of forgiveness at some point - they generally only fell out over the most trivial of matters. Anything serious, they were usually in accord. A kitchen full of junk food wasn't serious, and when Yamapi turned up a couple of hours later with some suitable replacements and an apology for snapping, Jin had an apology of his own ready to go. They spent the evening playing video games and stopping every so often to stick their heads in the freezer, and all was well again.

Not so the next morning, when Jin woke up a lot earlier than planned because Yamapi jumped on him.

"Jin!" he hissed. "Wake up!"

Jin groaned and rubbed his eyes. "It's still dark, Pi. I'm not going anywhere till it's morning."

"It _is_ morning! It's dark because there's a giant plant blocking the windows!"

"A giant...plant?"

He allowed himself to be dragged out of bed and marched across to the window, where he saw nothing whatsoever. "How do you know there's a giant plant?"

"It's on the news," Yamapi said. "A massive beanstalk sprouted in the park overnight. It must've been those beans I threw out the window. I guess it's a good thing we didn't eat them - we'd be dead right now."

"This week just gets better and better all the time," Jin muttered to himself. "It'll probably topple over and crush the building next."

Naturally they had to go outside and take a look for themselves. Hundreds of curious onlookers were doing the same, as were the police supposedly holding them back. You didn't have to be anywhere near the beanstalk to see it, of course. The giant, leafy stalk spiralled up into the clouds, beyond the eye's ability to follow - probably visible from space, Jin thought. He took exception to it blocking out the daylight in his apartment.

"What are you doing?" Yamapi wanted to know.

"I'm going to give it a piece of my mind."

No one tried to stop Jin as he approached the beanstalk, though several reporters began trailing after him, no doubt thinking it was all some sort of publicity stunt if top idols Akanishi Jin and Yamashita Tomohisa were involved. Jin was pretty sure he heard one of the cameramen mumbling about how it was the most awesome CM set he'd ever seen but he couldn't figure out what they were advertising.

When he reached the base, he jabbed the bright green stalk with an extremely indignant index finger and said, "You've got some nerve taking over the park like this. Now where am I supposed to take Pin for walks?"

Behind him, Yamapi groaned and clutched his forehead. "I knew I shouldn't have let you anywhere near the beer last night..."

The beanstalk didn't answer, of course, so Jin grabbed one of the giant leaves and shook it. "You hear me?"

"Of course it can't hear you," Yamapi said. "Now why don't you back off and we'll go to Starbucks where you won't be able to see it."

"I knew there was something weird about the old guy who gave me those beans." Jin grabbed another leaf, surprised by how tough the monstrous plant seemed. He might as well have been touching the Tokyo Tower. "He said to me, 'YOU, take these beans' - like that, with the 'YOU' in English - and when I didn't, he put them straight in my bag. He didn't even tell me what they were free samples of."

"Magic beans," Yamapi said knowingly. "Of course he didn't tell you anything. Nobody ever explains how to use magic stuff properly - you're supposed to figure it out for yourself. You should know that; you read just as much manga as I do."

"Nothing I've ever read involved a giant beanstalk taking over the park. What are we supposed to do with it? Use it to end world hunger?"

"You should do whatever your heart tells you to." Yamapi grinned. "That sounded good, didn't it? Listen to your best friend's sage advice."

Jin grinned back. "Some sage. You don't know what to do either."

But the crowd behind them did. "Climb it! Climb it! Climb it!"

"Climb that thing?" Jin tilted his head back, trying to see where it ended, and almost fell over in the process. "I can't even see the top!"

"Maybe it's one of those manly quest things, where you're supposed to prove yourself by embarking on a journey with an uncertain ending?"

"If I fall off, I'm pretty sure I know what the ending's going to be, Pi."

The reporters clustered around them. "Is it a promotion for your new single, Akanishi-kun?" one lady asked. "Is Yamashita-kun making a guest appearance?"

"Are you using a beanstalk in the PV to disassociate yourself from eggplants?" another one asked. "Are you aware that that the beanstalk is seen as a phallic symbol?"

The more they badgered him, blocking his escape route, the more Jin became convinced he'd have to climb the damned thing just to save himself from mortification. With any luck, by the time he came back down they'd all have scattered.

"I can't confirm anything right now," he said. "You'll have to wait and see along with everyone else." He gave his roommate a pleading look.

Yamapi rose to the occasion, using the crowd-control skills he'd honed in foreign airports. "Everyone, please step back. Jin is about to challenge himself by climbing the beanstalk and we don't want him to hurt anyone by falling on them."

"What about me getting hurt?" Jin muttered. "Or doesn't that count?"

"You're an idol - of course it doesn't count," Yamapi whispered back. "We all have to make sacrifices in the name of entertainment!"

"I never thought I'd be adding body parts to the list!"

Despite the risk to life and limb, Jin let himself be persuaded that climbing the tall, green monstrosity was just the sort of positive publicity his career could use, having been dented somewhat by his fondness for clubbing, love of alcohol, and tendency to push the boundaries of decency and good taste in his lyrics. (But he insisted _Lovejuice_ really wasn't about _that_ , no matter what people thought.)

If nothing else it would help him work off some of that ice cream, and maybe it would be cooler if he got away from the city heat. He wouldn't have to climb very high to be out of sight of the crowd below. Jin counted himself as fairly athletic - if not always terribly coordinated - and up to the challenge.

He grasped a leaf just above his head and another a little below, then got one foot up on a leaf at knee height. It held his weight surprisingly well, enough that he felt confident leaving the ground altogether. The leaves weren't evenly spaced but appeared at sufficient intervals for climbing.

Jin didn't let himself think about the drop below - looking down would be a mistake he didn't intend to make. Easier to focus on the sky above, the brilliant blue of a summer morning, split by a tower of green wide enough that he could've carved himself a spacious new house, had he the tools to hand. But having started out with nothing save his keys, iPhone and wallet in his pockets, he was hardly equipped to do so. He regretted not provisioning himself properly before setting out. He hadn't had breakfast, hadn't even slipped on his sunglasses to leave the apartment because the beanstalk had been blocking out the sun.

After about half an hour he stopped to rest, straddling a particularly sturdy leaf and leaning back against the stalk to catch his breath. Surely no one on the ground could see him anymore? He must've disappeared from view ages ago. He could sun himself on the leaf for a while, climb back down and tell everyone he'd reached the top and my, didn't Tokyo look small from that height?

But a little voice inside him, sounding suspiciously like one of his senpai, said he couldn't even think about descending. Not until he really had reached the top. No one on the ground would know if he lied, but _he'd_ know.

After five minutes pitting his conscience against the possibility that he might be climbing for hours to come and have to come down in the dark, Jin sighed and resumed his journey upwards.

He stopped keeping track of time after that. Even looking at the sky lost its fascination. Now he'd decided to keep climbing till he reached the top, the only thing he could see was the beanstalk in front of him, no further than the next leaf.

Which is why he almost fell off altogether when he reached up and found not another leaf, but flat stone. He stretched his hand as far over his head as it would go. More stone, cold and hard to the touch. He stepped up to the next leaf, boosting himself higher, and received a second shock.

Where the beanstalk ended a courtyard began, spanning further to each side than Jin's eyes could see. The only thing he could see, about twenty yards ahead, was a castle. A giant castle. A castle big enough that the beanstalk wouldn't have looked out of place in its garden. Grey stone towers stood at either end, looming over freakishly tall fruit trees bearing apples bigger than his car. Bordering the walls, beds of flowers formed impossible, unsolvable labyrinths. Jin hoped there wasn't a duckpond.

He hauled himself up to the courtyard, scooting away from the edge to stretch out sore muscles and wait till his breathing resumed its normal pattern. A giant castle! He couldn't wait to tell Yamapi. Of all the crazy things to find so high in the sky!

But...Pi would definitely ask him what was inside. Jin couldn't go back down without taking a peek. And maybe inside a giant castle there would be giant food, and he could sneak away with an oversized breadcrumb or something to ease the gnawing in his empty belly. He didn't dare try to get an apple from the trees. If one fell on him, he'd be flattened.

A growl from his stomach settled the matter. He had to find food - though after spending so long climbing, his need for water was more critical. He couldn't leave it much longer. The beanstalk couldn't shield him from the sun anymore and he felt parched enough already. The things an idol had to endure...

Jin forced himself to his feet and began to cross the courtyard, hoping to find a way to access the castle that didn't involve knocking on the oversized door - no one would ever hear him. As he approached the apple trees he was lucky enough to find a windfall sitting a little way from the trunk, slightly bruised from landing but otherwise intact. It must've been about six feet tall, he reckoned.

Ordinarily he wouldn't have tried to eat something that was actually a couple of inches taller than himself, but this was an emergency. He could solve both his hunger and thirst problems in one go...if only he could get into it. He circled it a few times, trying to gauge the best angle of approach, then remembered he had one of those miniature toolkits on his keys - a present from his father - complete with a knife. It didn't take him long to gouge out a chunk roughly the size of a normal apple and bite into it.

Oh, nothing had ever tasted so sweet, not even the time when one of his former dancers had invited him home for a taste of her own Lovejuice (and it wasn't _that_ , it really wasn't) and he'd spent the rest of the weekend with mango on his lips. He sucked down the juice greedily and cut himself a second helping, devouring this one with less haste. There was more than enough to go around, after all. True, the giant apple probably had an equally vast owner somewhere inside that castle, but he wouldn't miss a few tiny mouthfuls from a piece of bruised fruit, would he?

Sated, Jin abandoned the apple and contemplated the castle ahead of him. Enormous wooden doors blocked his path, far too heavy for him to even think of opening. He gave them a wide berth; if anyone emerged from inside, he'd be trodden on.

There had to be another way in. He trudged through the trees, alerted by rustling overhead just in time to throw himself out of the path of another falling apple. He got clear of the trees as soon as he could and had to sit down for a moment, shaken by his narrow escape. Compared to this, the things he'd had to do on _Hadaka no Shounen_ as a kid were _nothing_.

It wasn't often Jin wished for longer legs but at his height, the walk around the castle took forever. He tried to stick to the path after spotting a pair of eyes glinting in the grass - grass that grew to almost his shoulders, mind you, which wasn't exactly inviting to start with. If there were giant insects around he didn't want to encounter them; he had a hard enough time dealing with normal sized ones.

At the base of the rightmost tower his luck improved. He found a side-door latched open - the kitchen, judging by the aroma of curry drifting outside. If only the step were a little shorter! He had to drag a broken twig (a whole tree, from his tiny perspective) below the door in order to ascend. Huffing and puffing, Jin climbed over the doorframe and jumped down to the tiled floor below.

Inside, the curry scent almost overpowered him; the rest of the kitchen proved no less daunting. Cupboards seemed to go on for miles. Jin had to strain to see those above his head; his new point of view limited his vision greatly. If he wanted to see anything more than smooth pine doors and shiny blue handles, he had to get higher.

The solution presented itself in the form of a pink teatowel, which dangled low enough on its hook that Jin could just about reach it. He grabbed a fistful and tugged; it bore his weight easily so he worked his way slowly up the cloth, which was much cleaner than any of his own teatowels, until he reached the counter. After the ridiculous climb up the beanstalk, lesser heights ceased to bother him.

From the counter he had a much better view of the kitchen at large - clearly, the room wasn't just for show. All manner of enormous utensils hung from the pale blue walls, ranging from a frying pan Jin could've used for a swimming pool to wooden spoons the size of trees. Everything had its proper place, neat and clean.

All except the gigantic pot responsible for the curry scent. The cook was nowhere to be seen but he or she had to be coming back for it at some point and Jin didn't want to be out in plain sight when that happened. He'd show up easily on the counter top, with everything so pale and shiny.

Fortunately he had his choice of cover: the saltshaker on the left or the spice-rack on the right. He chose to stick close to the spice-rack as he edged his way across the counter, trying to get a better view of the rest of the room. It wouldn't do to fall in the sink - he'd be sure to slide down the plughole.

Across the kitchen, another door opened and Jin scurried to hide behind a jar of cinnamon before the cook could decide his curry would be improved by a little human flesh. Jin didn't know if giants really ate people or if that was just an old story, but if castles at the top of overgrown beanstalks could exist in reality, he was prepared to believe anything.

Anything, that is, except the identity of the mystery cook. Jin recognised him immediately, still had one of his _LIPS_ posters folded up and tucked away under his bed, where Yamapi didn't know about it. There was no mistaking the giant whose home he'd infiltrated. Reddish-brown hair, curling a little at the edges. A slight lump on his nose from his days of playing baseball. A face that seemed childishly cute from one angle and jaw-droppingly beautiful from another. He'd been Jin's secret crush for years, right up until he went missing six months ago and no one had heard from him since.

But why was former idol Kamenashi Kazuya living in a castle in the sky?

 _And more importantly, how did he get to be over a hundred feet tall?_

Kame, as Kamenashi was affectionately known to the world, didn't seem to be aware that anything was amiss. He stirred his curry, tasted a sample, and reached for the spice-rack. Jin flattened himself against the jar and hoped Kame didn't like cinnamon in his curry. The singer was known for being both eccentric and a keen cook; Jin had no doubt that the dish would be delicious. Even though he'd had the apple not so long ago, he wanted to taste some. Kame's fingers closed around the curry powder instead; Jin marvelled at the fact that the middle finger was probably as long as he was tall.

He watched for a while, smiling to himself about how he'd solved a mystery that had been plaguing the Japanese press for months. He'd been to Kame's final concert, pretended he hadn't been glazing over with bliss during the particularly provocative numbers so his friends wouldn't think he was there for any reason other than the music. Only Yamapi knew - but then, he'd been there when Jin had realised that maybe, he might kind of, just possibly, like men too. It wasn't the sort of thing you could keep from your best friend, especially when you lived together. Pi had been cool about it but Jin had no illusions his other friends would be the same, especially the ones who used to see Kame on TV, with his shaped eyebrows and painted nails, and say things they thought were funny. They'd wonder why Jin wasn't laughing too. Jin couldn't tell them it was because they made him feel boxed-in - small, somehow.

Well, he certainly couldn't feel much smaller at the moment, though for better reasons. From behind the cinnamon he could see Kame dish out a plate of curry and rice, then reach for a spoon. The cutlery drawer sounded like a building being demolished when it closed; Jin had to cover his ears. He should've expected that sounds would be bigger too.

By the time his ears stopped ringing Kame had departed with his food, leaving a ladle next to the pot. Jin scanned the room warily before darting out to try a sample. The ladle was too big for him, of course, but he ran a finger around the edge to swipe some curry. The strength of it knocked him down. Either Kame liked his curry on the volcanic side or Jin's tiny tastebuds couldn't handle such powerful flavours.

Still, the taste was nice, even if he did have to resort to stealing drops of condensation from a half-finished glass of juice at the other end of the counter to cool his burning tongue. From there he could see through the open door, to where Kame sat eating alone at a table, half-hidden behind a laptop. He must've been watching something, listening to something, maybe, because Jin could hear muffled Japanese. It took him a minute to figure out it was the commentary on a baseball game. Apparently things weren't going well for the Hanshin Tigers.

Having done the kitchen as well as he could, he shimmied down the teatowel again and set off on the long march across the floor, bound for the dining room. It looked lonely, with only one chair at the table. Jin clambered over the doorframe and found himself standing in velvet-soft red carpet up to his knees. Comfortable, to be sure, but oh so awkward to walk on. It was like wading through a swimming pool, only no good for floating in.

The dining room and lounge combined to make one large room, with an enormous couch down one end where Kame could lie in front of the fireplace on a cold night. There were no other seats. Landscapes and pictures of puppies decorated the walls but family photographs were conspicuously absent, as were any signs that Kame shared his home with others - or indeed ever received any visitors. But who could visit him all the way up there, anyway?

Certainly not Jin, who stood at the base of the table looking helplessly towards the ceiling. His climbing skills didn't extend to smooth, highly-polished - and therefore slippery - table legs. Everything looked polished, everything looked neat and tidy.

Everything except Kame himself, who merely looked...tired. Even watching his favourite sport didn't seem to animate him. He ate mechanically, one mouthful after another with no care or appreciation for taste. Jin wondered what he did with himself all day - if he had a job to go to (how did giants earn a living, anyway?) or if he even needed one. Did he have any friends, or had they all been left behind? Did he even have anyone to talk to?

The answer to all these questions proved to be 'no', as Jin discovered after watching Kame leave half his dinner, cover it up with clingfilm and leave both it and the remaining contents of the big pot in the fridge for another day before settling down on the couch. Following him around from room to room took forever and Jin felt exhausted by the time he collapsed against the side of the couch. He snuggled into the soft carpet, content just to remain still for a while and listen to the music playing overhead - Eric Clapton, not the cheeriest choice for an evening's listening.

He must've fallen asleep for a bit because the next thing he knew, Kame was on the move again, on his knees on the carpet. Jin saw the enormous gold ring to his left, realised why Kame was now on the floor and scrambled to get himself out of range of those searching fingers.

He almost made it. Kame touched the ring; Jin breathed a sigh of relief and thought he'd escaped...but then Kame bent down to see where it had fallen, and Jin couldn't get out of the way in time.

They stared at each other, two artists of the same generation with a hundred and twenty foot height difference between them. Kame's eyes widened, sparkling with curiosity, and he extended his hand palm-up to Jin. Frozen with the shock of being discovered and having those giant eyes fixed on him, Jin couldn't move, didn't dare to leave the safety of the couch. What if Kame thought he was some weird-looking rodent who had to be thrown out of the castle? What if those enormous fingers crushed the life right out of him?

Then Kame offered him a gentle smile, like Jin was some small, furry, woodland animal he was trying to entice to his hand. That wasn't the smile of an idol-crushing monster; Jin couldn't help but return it, letting Kame bespell him the way he'd done so many times before, on the screen or on the stage.

He took a couple of tentative steps forward, encouraged when Kame's hand didn't immediately snap shut the moment he set foot on it. It felt awkward to be walking on someone else's skin - he still had his boots on, after all - so he sat down in the centre of Kame's palm and waited to see what would happen next. Fingers brushed his back, not to capture but to contain, to protect; Kame's other hand joined the first and then Jin felt them leave the ground. He turned to clutch one of the fingers for safety, just about managing to link his hands around it.

"It's okay," Kame murmured (though it still sounded loud to Jin). "I'm not going to hurt you."

And Jin believed him without question, but that didn't make it any less nausea-inducing when Kame swept him up to the arm of the couch, no matter how slowly he did it. Throwing up on Kame's hand would be impolite, to say the least. When the movement stopped and Jin crawled out, he lay flat on the couch arm for a moment and hoped his stomach would stop turning itself inside out.

"Ah!" Kame squawked. "I should've moved slower; I'm sorry!"

Jin rolled over on his stomach and gave Kame his best unimpressed face. "Can you _please_ stop shouting?"

Kame squinted at him. "Did you say something?"

It was still louder than Jin liked, but you couldn't spend so long in nightclubs and concert venues without learning how to deal with noise - not to mention, how to make yourself heard. "Wouldn't you normally ask 'who are you?' first?"

Kame looked entranced, like hearing this tiny creature speak was some kind of miracle. "But I already know who you are. Akanishi Jin, right? But what are you doing here?"

"You know who I am?" Given their respective music genres, Jin found this surprising.

"If I don't, I went to some stranger's concert in January." Kame grinned sheepishly. "I guess I won't be going to any more, though. Not unless you start holding outdoor shows."

Some tiny parts of Jin - and all his parts were tiny, given the company he currently kept - curled in on themselves with secret glee that Kame not only knew who he was, but had been to one of his concerts. The rest of him was still feeling airsick.

"I wouldn't rule it out," he said. "But how did you get like this? And why are you living all the way up here?"

"I asked you first. And how do you know I haven't always been like this?" Kame teased.

"Because I've been to one of your concerts too." More than one, actually - a lot more - but Jin didn't want to come across like some kind of creepy stalker. He didn't think it was a good idea to let Kame know he could tell him apart from even the closest of doppelgangers simply because he knew the exact angles of his eyebrows. That was the sort of admission liable to get him dropkicked off the castle roof. "And I climbed up the beanstalk to get here."

 _"Beanstalk? I've got a bunch of apple trees, and I grow strawberries, and-"_

"Not in your garden," Jin interrupted. "Under it. Kind of."

"Okay," Kame said slowly. "Let's imagine for a second that there is a beanstalk underneath my garden." His tone suggested he thought Jin was either five years old or off his rocker. "How do you think it might have got there?"

Jin sat up in an effort to look more adult and sensible and almost fell backwards off the couch arm. "My roommate sent me out for groceries..."

"So Tokyo's below us?" Kame asked when Jin had finished explaining the beanstalk's origins. "Not just a whole lot of clouds?"

"Straight down the beanstalk," Jin said. "You really didn't know there was land down there?"

"You think I was going to go look over the edge to see what was beneath it?"

"Good point."

"But this is great!" Kame said. "If the beanstalk's that big, I can climb down it and go home!" Then his face fell. "My apartment's too small for me now. Everything's too small for me now."

"Why?" Jin wanted to know. "Everyone thought you'd had some sort of breakdown and run off to another country after that last show at the Budokan. The one with all the gay samurai drama and stuff. The press figured you were trying to make a statement."

Kame frowned. "I keep posting anonymously on forums to try leak a rumour that I'm studying in LA so my family can stop worrying, but it doesn't seem to be working."

Having heard stories about some of Kame's technological failures (all right, he hadn't heard them, he'd read them in idol magazines but he wasn't admitting to anyone that he sometimes bought them for himself), Jin wasn't sure where the problem lay "You are pressing 'post', right?"

"I think so?" Kame didn't seem certain. "I'm not very good with computers, but my laptop's the only connection I've got with the rest of the world, now - via satellite - and if that hadn't been set up when I got here, I don't know what I'd do."

"If you've got a connection then why don't you just email your family to tell them you're - sort of - okay? It's been nearly half a year since you vanished - they've got to be out of their minds by now!"

"And telling them that I've gone from being the shortest male in the family to being a giant is going to make it better? I can't face them like this! They'd be horrified!"

"I'm not," Jin said, "and I'm not even your relative." But then, he'd been surrounded by giant things since that morning, so a giant person wasn't much of a stretch for his imagination. Randomly emailing one's family to announce a growth spurt of over a hundred feet would have rather more impact.

"No," Kame said stubbornly. "Until I find a way to break the spell, I'm not telling anyone where I am...or what I am."

"You're still you, just...bigger," Jin said, trying to make him feel better. "Wait, what spell? Did some weird old man give you those magic beans to eat and now you're like that beanstalk?"

Kame shook his head, laughing a little. "Mine was a weird young woman instead. She caught me backstage after the show. I thought she was there for an autograph but she yelled at me because she thought her boyfriend liked me better than her - I didn't even know her, let alone any guy crazy enough to date her - and apparently the "gay samurai drama stuff", as you put it, was the nail in the coffin of their relationship.

"She held up her hand and the next thing I knew, I was up here in the clouds. I didn't realise I'd grown till an aeroplane went past and I almost knocked it out of the sky when I tried to flag it down."

"I don't remember hearing any reports of passengers seeing giants in the sky," Jin said. "Or castles."

Kame shrugged. "Maybe it's all invisible unless you're actually here, I don't know. It's obviously a magic castle - the kitchen restocks itself every day, and there's a wishing well in the back garden that provides me with everything else. Everything except a way to give me my life back, anyway."

"You have a wishing well?" Jin couldn't believe his ears. "Cool! It really works?"

He didn't understand why but Kame blushed as he said, "I think so."

Magic castles. Wishing wells. Giant idols. Jin wished his phone had a better camera. Yamapi was never going to believe him about all this. He sat back against the couch arm, smiling to himself and trying not to feel too self-conscious under Kame's gaze. Warm brown eyes stared at him, friendly but oh, so large!

"I'm a bad host," Kame said when he eventually turned away. "I haven't even offered you anything to eat or drink."

"I'm not hungry but have you got any beer?" Jin asked.

"Sure, I've-"

It hit them more or less simultaneously that even the smallest can of beer in Kame's fridge would be tall enough for Jin to climb inside.

"I'll see what I can do," Kame said. "Maybe I've got a straw around here somewhere."

Jin gave him a dubious look. "I think even a straw might be too big, if it's one of yours. There's a limit to what I can fit in my mouth."

"I'll find something," Kame assured him. "Give me a few minutes and try not to move."

"I'm not going to fall off."

Despite this claim, Jin ended up sliding down the arm anyway and Kame returned to find him struggling to climb out from between the arm and a cushion.

"Your couch is made of quicksand," Jin grumbled as Kame fished him out and deposited him on the cushion. "It tried to eat me."

"I'm sure it wasn't personal." He sat beside the couch so he could hear Jin and popped open a can of beer twice Jin's height. "I found this in my sewing kit." He held out a china thimble. "I've never used it; I washed it out for you."

The thimble made a rather large cup. Kame half-filled it with beer and passed it down; Jin could just about hold it steady with both hands. He held it up in Kame's general direction and said, "Cheers!"

Kame didn't even attempt to clink their drinks together - the impact would bowl Jin over. "Cheers!"

Jin couldn't quite finish what amounted to a pitcher of beer; Kame had to take it away from him since he couldn't set it down without it falling over. Drinking from a curved container was by no means ideal.

"I'll have to go out and ask the well for some doll teacups or something," Kame said. "I can't give you a thimble of coffee with breakfast."

"Breakfast?" Jin said muzzily. He felt like he'd been drinking for hours.

"You know, that thing you have in the morning? You _are_ staying here tonight, right?"

"I..." Jin looked at his watch, realised he'd been in the castle a lot longer than he thought, and resigned himself to spending the night. "I guess so. I can't climb back down the beanstalk like this." When he stood up the room spun so badly he had to sit down again, which set Kame laughing at him.

"I'd better find you somewhere safe to sleep," Kame said through his giggles; clearly, Jin wasn't the only one feeling tipsy. "Where you won't fall off anything!"

It was easier, this time, to settle down in Kame's cupped hands and enjoy the ride through the air. Jin lay back against strong, supportive fingers to watch the world whip past until they reached the bedroom, where Kame's well-documented love of baseball was evident. He found the Yomiuri Giants jersey somewhat ironic, though.

Kame shrugged. "I was wearing it when the crazy lady broke into my dressing room. Maybe she was inspired."

"Good thing you're not an Orix Buffaloes fan." Jin knelt up over Kame's fingers to peer around the room, taking in the posters and charts covering most of the walls. "Were these here when you arrived?"

"Wishing well," Kame said. "I tried to ask for my own baseball team once but it doesn't do anything if I'm not specific enough. That or it doesn't work with people." He paused, then added, "At least, I didn't think it did..."

Jin thought that sounded vaguely curious but the beer had too great a hold on his brain to let him take the thought any further. He sat in the middle of Kame's bed, well away from any edges, while Kame fussed over his sleeping arrangements.

"How about this?" Kame asked at length after trying and rejecting half a dozen options. "If I pull out the drawer of my nightstand, it's shallow enough that you can climb out, but deep enough that you can't possibly fall over the edge."

He emptied out the drawer, replacing the pair of magazines inside with a comfortable nest of cotton wool which he sheeted with a red silk handkerchief - fresh from the wash, he assured Jin. Covers were unnecessary in such warm weather; Jin thought he could manage very nicely without.

But before he settled down to enjoy what looked to be the most luxurious night of his life, he wanted a bath. A day of climbing and traversing giant castle grounds had left him feeling far too grubby to lie on silk.

Before Kame got close enough for Jin to relay this fact, he headed off the problem himself.

"I spent most of the day in the kitchen and you spent it climbing - I think we could probably both use a bath." He dropped down by the bed and set one hand on the mattress, which had the unfortunate effect of bouncing Jin into the air. Not very far, luckily. "Oops. Sorry about that. So how about it?"

"I'm not much of a swimmer when I'm drunk..."

Kame grinned. "You won't have to swim; I've got an idea."

Jin hoped it didn't involve sitting on Kame's knee in the bath, because as entertaining as that could've been under other circumstances, it would just be ridiculous now - not to mention, embarrassing. He let Kame scoop him up again and deposit him on the marble counter in the bathroom, which was just as neat as the rest of the rooms he'd seen so far and refreshingly cool, though not for long as Kame plugged the bath and turned on the taps, filling the air with steam and the scent of strawberry bubble bath.

"Try not to move this time," Kame advised. "I'll be back in a second."

Mindful of the couch incident, Jin didn't move more than a few fingers and that was only so he could check his phone. He had several emails from Pi asking where he was, but before he could answer Kame returned with an eggcup, which he held out for Jin to inspect.

"Don't laugh," Kame said when he smiled at the turtle pattern on the eggcup. "It wasn't my choice. The well has a sense of humour."

Though the eggcup was as tall as Jin, the stand made up half of it and the rest formed a usable - if unusually deep - bath. Kame dipped it in his own strawberry bathwater and set it down on the counter, placing a tub of moisturiser next to it as a crude step.

Jin beamed up at him. "Don't suppose you've got a tiny towel?"

The smallest flannel Kame could find would've served Jin better as a picnic blanket - to seat a family of two dozen - but he set it down next to the improvised bath anyway, folding it over several times so Jin could jump straight out of the bath and onto a soft cushion if he so desired.

He ducked behind the eggcup to slip out of his clothes, which gave Kame a much-needed hint to take his eyes off him. Jin was used to changing in crowded dressing rooms and showering with strangers, but more often than not _he_ had the height advantage, which he certainly didn't have here, and Kame's focus unnerved him. He hadn't felt so much like an insect under a microscope since the first time he'd appeared on television.

Fortunately Kame caught on soon enough and turned away to disrobe, leaving Jin to climb into the eggcup, lowering himself slowly down into the hot, sweet-scented water. He settled in with a contented sigh, just in time to see Kame disappearing into his own bath.

Even in an industry full of skinny people Kame had always stood out as having sharper hipbones than the rest, but his forced hiatus seemed to have agreed with him, allowing him to fill the gaps between fine lines with graceful curves, making him no less beautiful but much more real than the half-starved waif he'd once been. Jin had flipped through photoshoots in fashion magazines and longed to take him out to dinner, if only to put some meat on his bones.

No need for that now, though. Kame looked strong and solid and healthy enough to take on the world by himself. Even the shadows under his eyes seemed to have lessened in the few hours Jin had spent with him, talking and drinking, sharing stupid stories about common acquaintances in the industry. Much happier than the subdued young man who'd left half his dinner in favour of moping on the couch.

Jin didn't know how much the alcohol filtered his perceptions of Kame or how much of the image he now saw was due to the significant height difference, but he got quite an eyeful when Kame sat down in the bath, prompting a brief surge of jealousy. No matter what the magazines said, size _did_ matter.

They couldn't talk while they bathed - something Kame only realised when he asked a question and couldn't hear Jin's answer - but the silence was companionable rather than awkward, allowing them to relax in comfortable warmth. The hot water eased Jin's sore muscles and left him mellow to the point of falling asleep, which he would've done had Kame not suddenly loomed over him in a bathrobe, wet hair dripping all over the eggcup.

"You didn't drown!" Kame sounded relieved. "I couldn't tell."

Jin rubbed water from his eyes where Kame had dripped on him. "I'm not two years old," he pointed out. "I can swim, I can climb, and if I'd called for help you'd definitely have heard me."

"I know, I know. But you're so tiny, I can't help worrying."

"You'll get wrinkles."

"Yeah, but it's not like they'll destroy my career," Kame said. "Not anymore."

Jin gave him a sympathetic smile and made him hold the eggcup steady so he could throw himself over the edge. The flannel mountain welcomed him in, and he took a certain primitive pleasure in rolling around on the counter wrapped in his super-size towel. If nothing else, it distracted Kame. Jin didn't like it that his host had lost hope. Mystery hiatuses didn't necessarily kill careers - Jin should know, he'd taken one himself a while back - but Kame had a reputation as a workaholic and it had to be killing him that he no longer had a reason to get up in the mornings.

Now dry, Jin reluctantly redressed, wishing he had a change of clothes with him. "You think the well could handle clothing?"

"If you like your jeans that baggy, try some of mine," Kame teased. "Should we go ask it?"

This time Jin rode in the breast pocket of Kame's bathrobe, which made for a brisk but rough journey through the castle and out into the garden, where the well was illuminated by an outside light. Far above the city lights the night sky stretched clear and dark beyond the castle grounds, peaceful without flashing neon and the rumble of trains. It brought home to Jin just how _alone_ Kame must have felt.

He could hear Kame's heart beating through the white towelling robe, steady as his footsteps down the path. The constant jolting was an irritation, but at least it was even, and Jin soon learned when to cling on, when it was safe to lean over, and when it was best simply to curl up inside the pocket and wait for them to stop moving.

When they eventually came to a halt, Kame patted the pocket gently. "You okay in there?"

"I miss my car," Jin mumbled, peering out over the fabric to see where they'd stopped. "At least that has seatbelts."

Kame held out his hand so Jin could climb on and take a proper look at the well. "Try not to fall in."

Jin gave him a disparaging look, wishing it wasn't too small to be effective. He didn't know what to make of the wishing well. Ones in shopping malls tended to be ornate; festive, even. Not so Kame's, which didn't have so much as copper trim.

Or a winch, come to that.

"How do you get things out of it?" Jin asked. "I'm not seeing a bucket."

"I make a wish and stuff appears," Kame said. "Eventually. Sometimes it takes a while. It took a couple of days before it would give me a change of clothes. All I had was an apron; you have no idea how glad I was the press couldn't see me cooking."

Jin fervently hoped the well would be more cooperative in his case. Improvising a bath? Manageable. Improvising a set of clothes in his size? Not so much.

Since Kame advised him to be as specific as possible, Jin outlined his requirements right down to how baggy he wanted his jeans to be. While he was at it he threw in a necklace he'd always wanted - nothing wrong with trying for a few freebies. Kame added in a new silver hoop earring for himself.

"You can always use it for a hula hoop?" he suggested to Jin, who was less than amused.

"It'd probably crush me," Jin said. "How do we know if the well's worked?"

"We go to sleep and hope something shows up in the morning - that's what usually happens."

Sleep sounded appealing to Jin after such a long day. He let Kame tuck him back in the pocket and curled up at the bottom rather than watch the world sway on the walk back. But they didn't return immediately. He fell into a light doze while Kame made some additional requests, which filtered through to Jin as muffled babbling. He barely noticed the bumpy ride back to the castle, though he came a little closer to consciousness when Kame's fingers closed gently around him, scooping him up to deposit him on a mattress of silk and cotton wool.

Jin sprawled out on his unconventional bed and fell asleep smiling to himself, knowing he'd dream of magic.

\-----

Whether Jin dreamt of magic or not, he couldn't remember. He woke up to find a pair of giant eyes peering down at him and since they didn't belong to either his roommate or their dogs, he screamed.

The giant eyes blinked at him. "Good morning to you too," their owner said.

Jin uncurled himself from the ball of cotton wool he'd somehow clasped to his chest during the night and took a calming breath. _Kame._ Of course.

"I'm not really a morning person," he said, yawning for emphasis. "More of a night owl."

Kame grinned. "So I hear. I hope your head's all right after last night because there's no way I can cut down painkillers small enough for you to swallow."

"My head's fine, I'm just...disoriented. I'm not used to waking up in someone's nightstand drawer." It wasn't the first time he'd woken up in someone else's home, but he'd never been in a situation quite like this before. He rubbed sleep from his eyes and sat up; Kame dropped to the floor to put them on the level. "Did the well work?"

"Shall we go find out?" Kame extended a hand - but sideways, as if inviting Jin to hold hands with him. He realised his mistake when Jin didn't move and turned it palm up for travel. "Sorry. Even though I can see you're that small, it sometimes takes a while to sink in."

"It's not that I'm small," Jin said, indignant. "You're the one who had the growth spurt from hell."

Pain flashed through Kame's eyes, quick enough that Jin might've missed it if he hadn't been watching, and he felt instantly contrite. It wasn't Kame's fault he was stuck like this. Jin had been on the receiving end of crazy fan activity himself, ranging from having his phone bill stolen to people posting comestibles through his mailbox, and there was just no stopping someone if they decided to make your life a misery. Admittedly Kame could now sit on any troublemakers and squash them flat, but still...

"I guess I could stand to gain a few inches," Jin said, trying to make amends. "Some of my American friends dwarf me."

"I've got plenty to spare," Kame said. "Help yourself."

Jin couldn't, of course, but he held Kame's pinky tight - for safety - as they headed for the dining room, and Kame seemed to appreciate that. When they reached the table it looked like Christmas had come half a year early. Boxes of all shapes and sizes buried Kame's red plaid tablecloth.

"You think the well finally gave you your baseball team?" Jin said nervously, hoping the boxes didn't contain body parts. "I didn't wish for that much stuff."

"I might've thrown in a few extras while you were napping in my pocket," Kame said. "I've never been able to master impulse control when it comes to shopping."

Fortunately for Jin, who couldn't handle haunted houses and would've run away screaming from dismembered baseball players, the boxes dripped not with blood but with small blue chunks of polystyrene.

"No wonder they're so big," Kame said in disgust. "It's all this padding!"

Jin sat on one of the chunks and watched as Kame tore into the boxes, not being in a position to help, though he did occasionally have to chase after a stray piece and throw it in the bag Kame had hung from the table. At least it didn't weigh much.

He found the box contents fascinating. The first one Kame opened held clothing - albeit not quite what Jin had wished for.

"You can see my legs in these jeans," he mourned, holding up a pair that, far from being baggy, would cling to him at every opportunity.

"Look at it this way," Kame said. "At least you won't trip over them and fall off the table?

"Besides, it wouldn't kill you to wear clothes that actually fit for a change."

"I like to wear comfortable things. I had enough of skintight stuff when I was starting out." Jin didn't like the look of some of the T-shirts in the clothing pile, either. One of them would definitely show off his ribs. People kept telling him he had a nice figure but he wanted them to pay more attention to his music than his looks. Unfortunately, one couldn't maintain a career in the entertainment industry without spending considerable time under the spotlight.

"Been there," Kame sympathised. "When I think about some of the things I've had to wear over the years..." He shuddered and set to work on the next box while Jin took the chance to slip under an overturned box and change into fresh clothing.

When he emerged in jeans, sandals and a black V-neck T-shirt, Kame stopped to give him a nod of approval.

"Was the underwear okay?"

"I wasn't expecting pink," Jin admitted, "but I can live with it."

"Just be grateful it didn't give you panties," Kame said. "It tried that with me once. I had to threaten to dump a bottle of olive oil in it to make it cooperate."

Jin murmured a few words of thanks under his breath and wandered off to investigate the next box, which Kame had left open. This one looked like a start-up kit for newlyweds, full of cutlery and crockery, all of it in Jin's size.

"I'll put the kettle on," Kame said, clearly charmed by the miniature utensils. "I might need an eyedropper to fill your coffee cup, though."

It didn't matter how the coffee got in the cup, so long as it wasn't decaf - though Jin did wonder, after Kame handed him the tiny cup, if perhaps drinking anything stronger than water was a good idea. He didn't want to be bouncing off the walls.

When it turned out to be weaker than he'd expected Kame explained that he'd watered it down, just to be on the safe side. "I'm sure your fans would get a kick out of seeing you hyper but I don't think it's a good idea."

Jin feigned a pout. "But aren't you my fan too?"

"Oh yeah." Kame laughed over the rim of his own coffee cup. "I'm your _biggest_ fan."

There was no disputing that fact, but Jin had always found it weird meeting fellow celebrities for the first time. There were people he'd known for years, like Yamapi, who weren't "famous" in his eyes because they were his friends and therefore just as human as he was. Then there were people he considered to be his juniors in the entertainment world, who by definition couldn't be classed as intimidating. There were glamorous foreign singers and actors he'd met through work, some of whom had been kind and patient with his halting English conversation while others had barely deigned to notice him.

And then there was Kamenashi Kazuya, who'd joined the entertainment world at the same time as Jin and grown up in front of the cameras, morphing from a spiky-haired, beetle-browed brat to a silk-smooth shining _star_. Kame had many faces, from the baseball boy who took pride in his wounds, to the fashionable diva who owned enough designer gear to feed a third-world country; from the serious, hard-working actor to the gentle, considerate friend beloved by everyone who knew him; from the guitar-strumming balladeer to the eyeliner-wearing rock god. Oh yes, Jin had seen them all.

But he'd never seen this particular incarnation of Kame, who lounged about in his boxers and laughed at his own lame jokes. Jin couldn't help laughing too.

They'd never met before. Jin had toyed with the idea of slipping backstage after a concert, maybe getting a mutual friend to introduce them so he didn't look quite so desperate, but somehow he'd always managed to talk himself out of it. How did one approach a chameleon, no matter how friendly he seemed? Jin had no idea, couldn't figure out what to say without making a complete fool of himself.

But when they'd finally met he'd had no trouble, perhaps because the whole situation was simply so ridiculous that he couldn't have kept quiet if his life had depended on it. Talking to someone who could crush him with one hand shouldn't have been so easy, so comfortable, but Jin couldn't bring himself to feel awkward or cowed in the slightest and hadn't done since the first time he'd allowed Kame to coax him to his hand.

He did feel a bit embarrassed when his stomach growled loud enough for Kame to hear, though.

"I can take a hint," Kame said. "Now to see what I can fit on these tiny plates of yours."

They decamped to the kitchen where Jin rinsed and dried his unpacked eating implements in the lid of an empty spice jar, upturned and filled with a mix of hot water and washing up liquid. It was a bit like doing the dishes in the bathtub, he thought. Meanwhile, Kame made them an omelette to share. Jin's share, of course, would be a tiny fraction of Kame's.

Kame did his best to cut a piece for Jin but even so, it ended up hanging off the edges of the plate. Jin enjoyed it nevertheless but resisted Kame's attempts to give him a refill.

"You should eat more," Kame said firmly. "You're too skinny."

Jin sighed. Another reason he hated wearing clothes that actually fit. People started worrying about his health. "An elephant would look skinny to you right now. Anyway, I eat tons. I've just been dancing a lot lately."

"I miss dancing." Kame slipped another sliver on Jin's plate despite his protests. "I miss devising complicated performances or just sitting on the stage with my guitar. I miss my family, and my friends, and my dogs.

"I miss my life."

Against his better judgement Jin cleaned his plate again. If it made Kame feel better to feed him up, who was he to argue?

"I'm pretty sure your life misses you too," was what he tried to say, but it emerged as a croak. Constantly projecting his voice had finally caught up with him.

Kame lowered his head to bring his ears within range. "Did you say something?"

"I tried." Jin cleared his throat a couple of times. It didn't seem to help much, only taking him from "jackdaw" to "frog". He pointed to his throat and shook his head.

"I think I've got something that'll help, if the well granted my wish. We'll have to check the other boxes." Kame held out his hand again. Breakfast was over.

Back in the dining room Jin sat on a chunk of polystyrene and sipped his tiny glass of orange juice while Kame tore into the remaining boxes. If the second one had contained a kitchen set for newlyweds, the next held the rest of the house. A small table and chair, doll-sized to Kame but just right for Jin, replaced the polystyrene seat. Then came a proper bed, complete with fluffy pillows and a mattress so springy Jin had to resist the urge to leap on it immediately. A long, luxurious couch with enormous cushions. A shiny white standalone bathtub with matching mirrored washstand. A chest of drawers to hold all the clothes from the first box.

And finally, half a dozen stepladders on wheels, all of which extended far enough for Jin to climb up and down the furniture with ease.

It was more furniture than he'd had in his first apartment. The well must've been incredibly powerful, to be able to produce so much overnight.

Kame didn't seem nearly as thrilled as Jin, though. "I figured the toiletries kit would be in here," he said with a frown. "Deodorant, razor, stuff like that. I asked for it especially."

Since Jin had shaved yesterday and it took him days to grow even the faintest hint of stubble, he didn't mind too much about the lack of razor. Kame, on the other hand, looked like he needed to shave at least twice a day - more, if his legs were any indication.

He started to respond but Kame gestured for him to save his voice, so he stretched out on his brand new couch and waited to see what else the well had brought.

The toiletries kit fell out of the next box as Kame opened it, so Jin made use of the mirror on his washstand and attacked his tangled hair with the brush. It was too bad they couldn't hook the furniture up to the water supply - he'd have to wait to make use of the toothbrush. Fortunately, Kame had thought to wish for some gum.

In the last box Kame finally found what he'd been searching for - a microphone, which, unlike everything else, wasn't in Jin's size. It came up to his knees.

"We can plug it into my laptop and switch on the speakers," Kame explained. "Then you don't have to speak up all the time for me to hear you."

This idea met with Jin's hearty approval. He waited for Kame to break all the boxes down and stack them neatly beside the bin, and remove every last scrap of polystyrene from the table before setting up his laptop. It took Kame a few minutes to remember his password, and then Jin had to plug the microphone in himself since Kame couldn't find the port...

Jin tested the mic with the first couple of lines of 'Kizuna', Kame's most well-known song, and got a real kick out of watching him break into an embarrassed smile. He still sounded a little croaky, sure, but it was a hard song to ruin - sweet, stirring and beautiful.

Kame harmonised with him on a line and stopped, shaking his head but still smiling. "Don't strain yourself. I'm going to set these ladders on the floor," he moved as he spoke, extending one of them so Jin could climb down from the table if he wanted, "and go get dressed. I could put on the radio or something if you want?"

"I need to check my messages anyway." Jin pulled out his phone. It felt _so_ good to be able to speak at normal volume again and know Kame could hear him without straining.

He ignored the racket coming from the bathroom and opened his inbox. Yamapi had sent another couple of mails, as it turned out, with the worry content increasing in magnitude. They started off reporting how he'd baffled the press by vanishing up the beanstalk, and how it was a great laugh but could Jin please come back down now because it was his week to do laundry and the situation was getting critical? Then Pi wanted to know if Jin was still up the beanstalk at all: had he maybe slipped back down and gone out for the night?

By the next one he was enquiring whether or not he should call the fire department for a rescue, thinking that perhaps Jin was stuck a mile above Tokyo and unable to climb down.

The final email just asked if Jin was okay, followed by ice cream emoji. Jin rolled his eyes at the imaginary figure of his best friend and closed the message. As if he'd go _that_ far just because he'd been dumped and was otherwise having a pretty lousy week. The mail from his mother didn't help matters - it took him a while to decipher it, since half of it was in Korean, but she also implied that if her eldest son needed to talk, she was always available.

He'd just started to compose a reply to Yamapi when Kame returned, shaven and dressed in artfully torn denim cut-offs and a plain white V-neck.

"What were you doing in there?" Jin asked, sitting next to the microphone. "It sounded like you had a lawnmower going in your bathroom!"

"Close." Kame rubbed a hand over his now-smooth cheek. "That was my shaver. And then the electric toothbrush."

Just like in the ads for Kame's many endorsements, Jin thought. _He_ only got to do skincare products these days. At least they were for men. He'd been offered the chance to advertise sanitary towels once after making a bad joke during a concert about having his period, but even his manager couldn't blame him for turning it down. Ryo would've ribbed him about it for the rest of his life.

"Did you have many messages?" Kame asked.

"Mostly from my best friend wondering where the hell I am. I really need to answer him." The instant Jin started typing a reply his battery died. He swore under his breath and had a moment of shock when the microphone picked it up and broadcast it all over the room. "I don't suppose the well can handle iPhone chargers?"

"I don't know what kind of adaptor would allow you to plug your phone in up here..."

He had to concede Kame had a point, and resigned himself to leaving Pi in the dark a while longer.

"If you've got a webmail account you could use my laptop to email him?" Kame suggested.

Jin shot him a look of undying gratitude. By the time he made it down the beanstalk his best friend would be frantic, and Jin just couldn't do that to him. It wasn't like they had to talk every day or anything - though since they'd moved in together, it happened anyway - and because of their different schedules sometimes they didn't connect for a while, but they tried not to make each other worry.

It wasn't until Kame opened up Gmail and sat back to let Jin type in his username and password that they realised things weren't going to be quite so straightforward. While not enormous, the keyboard of Kame's laptop was about four times as long as Jin, with each individual key approximately two square feet. Even stretching as carefully as he could, Jin struggled to hit keys on the top row without leaning on anything lower down.

" _That's_ your username?" Kame said. "How do you pronounce it?"

Jin looked up at the screen to discover he'd accidentally thrown in three extra letters. At least he could walk up the keyboard to reach the backspace. If he managed to type his password right it'd be a miracle.

After two failed attempts he successfully logged in, ignoring Kame snickering in the background, and realised he'd have to use keyboard shortcuts for everything unless he wanted to give himself a hernia moving the mouse.

"I'll hit 'Compose mail', shall I?" Kame helpfully opened up a new mail for him and set the cursor in place.

Jin wasn't sure what to type. The thing about the castle at the top of the beanstalk, that worked well as a story told in person, but if he emailed Yamapi to tell him about it he'd sound crazy. Not that the giant beanstalk itself wasn't strange, but there were limits.

In the end he decided to say simply that his phone was out of charge but he was okay, and not hiding away from the press to nurse the broken heart he didn't have, and that nobody had any reason to worry about him.

Easier said than done.

"Wow, your spelling is _horrible_." Kame voice dripped with awe. "I thought that thing about fans sending you dictionaries was just a rumour, but-"

"Shut up," Jin said. "I can spell - I just can't type." He reached for an "E", slipped, and fell flat on the keyboard. A line of "D"s raced across the screen. "Do you have a pencil?"

The pencil, when Kame found one, proved too heavy for Jin to wield easily, but a toothpick made a better stylus and within the hour they had a complete email waiting to be sent. Jin typed his name and collapsed from the combined exertion of clambering all over the keyboard and contorting himself into strange shapes to reach far-off keys, while trying not to spear himself in the foot with the toothpick. Kame helpfully selected Yamapi's address for him and sent the message before logging Jin out of Gmail.

"There," Jin wheezed into the microphone, still leaning against the laptop. "Now maybe he won't send a rescue team after me."

"I didn't wish for a rescue team," Kame said, deadpan. "They can't come in."

"Did you wish for me?" Jin said lightly.

"Um..." Kame stared at the ceiling.

"You did? Seriously?" Jin didn't know whether to be flattered or creeped out.

"Not exactly." Kame still wouldn't look at him, and the colour rose in his cheeks as he spoke. "The well's never sent me a person before. I wasn't kidding about the baseball team, but I've tried wishing for someone to break the spell, I've tried wishing for the woman who cast it in the first place...I've even tried wishing for my dogs. I figured it only worked on inanimate objects.

"But a couple of days ago I was watching TV online and commercials came on with some of my friends, and I just..." Kame shrugged. "It's so lonely up here. You're the first person I've spoken to in half a year - if I didn't sing to myself in the kitchen, I think I'd have forgotten how to use my voice by now.

"So I went out to the well and wished for a friend. I think it sent me you."

 _Friend._ Jin loved that word. To him it meant warmth and safety, someone with whom he could have stupid fights over who got the last slice of pizza and battle it out for supremacy on the Wii. Someone who'd hit the clubs with him and stop him going home with the wrong girl; someone to sympathise with him when his manager got mad over a trifle. Someone to comfort him when he felt upset, and answer those three a.m. phone calls when he didn't know what to do or where to go.

He wasn't sure what the word meant to Kame, but he kind of liked the idea that it might apply to him. The well seemed to think so, at any rate.

"Friend," Jin said slowly. "You ask for a friend and the well sends you someone you've never even met before?"

Kame finally met his eyes. "Wishing wells work in mysterious ways, I guess."

"I think I like the way this one works." Jin knew his own face had to be about as red as Kame's by now. Maybe he could use the summer heat as an excuse.

The rest of the day flew by. Jin completely forgot he had a PV to shoot the next day, couldn't care less about work or the fact that the laundry back in his apartment had likely evolved into a new lifeform by now. He was having too much fun with his new friend.

They started off by finding the best spots to position the ladders and Jin's furniture. Jin thought it made sense to put the bed by Kame's own bed, and so on, but Kame liked the idea of setting aside a separate area, perhaps on the lowest shelf of his bookcase, and putting it all there.

"Like a dollhouse," Jin said.

"I've got a niece, okay?"

Kame relented when Jin pointed out that while it might be easier for him to get to, he still couldn't fill his bath with water unless it was actually in the bathroom. After that, they placed everything in the appropriate rooms.

Then they went around the castle rigging up elaborate pulley systems wherever Jin decided he wanted to be able to get into things - such as the kitchen cupboards - though whenever conversation became too awkward they had to return to the microphone. Kame couldn't have been happier, throwing himself into the project like he'd been waiting all his life for it.

"How do you normally keep yourself busy?" Jin asked when they sat down to polish off yesterday's curry - now sweetened for his benefit. He had his own plate and spoon, and sat at his little table and chair atop Kame's dining room table with the microphone beside him.

"I play a lot of solitaire." Kame took another spoonful of curry. "Not really. Sometimes I write songs that no one will ever hear, or I take myself on trips around the world over the Internet and think about all the places I'll never get to go because I'd scare the locals if I tried.

"I cook, I watch a lot of streaming baseball games and bad dramas - including yours - and I clean. I clean a lot, actually."

Jin homed in on the most embarrassing part. "You watch _my_ dramas? I wish you hadn't said that."

"I said the dramas were bad, not you specifically. I liked your last one a lot, the one where you were a rookie cop who had to go undercover in a nunnery? I thought you were pretty convincing."

"As a girl or a nun?"

Kame winked. "Just be glad we're not the same size or your virtue would be in serious danger, Sister."

They both pretended their faces were red from the curry, rather than acknowledge that the temperature in the room was rising from something other than summer's heat. Jin wondered if Kame had wished for something more than a friend. After six months with no human contact whatsoever the poor guy was probably desperate for any form of interaction, no matter how innocent, but that last comment was flirting any way you looked at it.

Which meant that maybe Jin's secret crush wasn't entirely hopeless.

But Kame had a history of having chemistry with anyone and anything, animate or otherwise, regardless of gender. (As several deflowered chairs could testify.) Maybe he flirted on autopilot and Jin just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Despite all the rumours about Kame's preferences he'd never heard anything concrete - except that when it came to women, he liked them to be about twice his age. How old he liked men, and even if he liked men, remained to be seen.

An opportunity for investigation arose when Kame decided he wanted to paint his nails that evening. After another strawberry-scented bath, this time with Jin in his own tub, the two of them sat next to the laptop in matching robes - another item from Kame's wishing spree - with an army of nail polish bottles spread before them.

"Red, white and blue," Kame decided, selecting the colours from the line-up.

"American flag!"

"British flag!"

After bickering about this for a few minutes the only thing they could agree on was that it wasn't going to be the French flag.

"I can't do an American flag anyway," Kame said. "The stars are too small for me to paint."

Jin had the perfect solution to this problem in the form of a brush he'd found in the toiletries kit, which was either supposed to be unisex or aimed at men who wore make-up. Using it for nail polish would probably ruin it for eye shadow but Jin didn't care, he only needed it to last long enough to paint the stars. Kame tipped a few drops of white polish into a saucer for him, once the blue background was dry.

They both worked on the nails of Kame's left hand at once; Jin painting stars on the pinky while Kame painted stripes on the thumb. Total accuracy was impossible but they gave it a good shot. Jin sat crosslegged on the table with Kame's little finger across his lap, marvelling at how unexpectedly normal the situation seemed when it should've been a disturbing hybrid between horror and Disney movies. Perhaps the curry had messed with his mind.

"You still paint your nails even when there's no one around to see it?" he asked.

"You're here, aren't you? And I do it for me, for fun."

"See, this is why some of my friends think you're kind of...strange."

"Hmm?" Kame paused in the middle of a red stripe. "Strange how?"

Jin took a deep breath, then wished he hadn't when the nail polish fumes hit him. "Like, one of your PVs will play on TV and they'll start saying, 'Oh, he plucks his eyebrows and paints his nails like a girl, he's so gay'; stuff like that."

"And they're right," Kame said mildly, going back to working on his stripe, "but I don't paint my nails because I'm gay. I paint my nails because I'm a rock star."

"You're not a rock star!"

"I am sometimes," Kame said, and Jin had to admit that after _LIPS_ had come out, the entire country had worshipped Kame as a rock god. "And if I didn't do something about my eyebrows, my career would never have gone anywhere.

"Not that it's going anywhere now..."

Best to avoid that line of thought. Jin squeezed Kame's pinky tightly and hoped he could feel it. There had to be a way to shrink Japan's "biggest" idol down to normal size again. What went up had to come down, right?

"You're smearing the stars," Kame said.

Jin sighed and started over again with the brush.

\-----

By the next morning Kame's second bathroom looked like it had been taken over by fishermen - or physics teachers - because there were nets and pulleys everywhere, a result of their combined ingenuity relating to matters of personal hygiene. (After almost falling in the oversized toilet twice, Jin had decided enough was enough and something had to be done about it.)

"It's like you're moving in!"

Kame's smile had rarely left his face since the previous night. They'd taken it in turns to embarrass each other by finding old drama clips on YouTube, and Jin had spent half the evening burying his head in the cushions of his little couch. Watching Kame play a binge-eating boxer in love with a nun? Okay. Watching himself play a rookie cop undercover as a nun? Okay, if somewhat mortifying.

Listening to Kame dream up a crossover where he played a binge-eating boxer in love with a nun who happened to be an undercover cop? Jin wasn't sure whether to bury his head in the cushions or throw himself off the table and be done with it. But Kame's enthusiasm was infectious, and before long he had Jin working on the story too, making it spiral wildly out of control as the two of them teamed up to fight crime and eat delicious food. They glossed over whether or not Kousaku ever noticed the gender discrepancy.

Jin wanted to say that he didn't have time to move in, that he was supposed to be shooting a PV right now and his manager probably wanted his head on a platter...but he couldn't. If he left now, Kame would be lonely again, all by himself at the top of the beanstalk with no one to talk to. No one to laugh with.

No one to scramble across the wide gulf between nightstand and bed (which must've been all of an inch to Kame) to curl up on his pillow. Kame hadn't said anything when he'd found Jin clinging to his hair in the morning, but he hadn't needed to.

Jin couldn't help it. For years, he'd been watching Kame from afar, always wanting to approach him but never even trying, and now he had this wonderful opportunity he wanted to get as close as possible. It still didn't seem real, wouldn't seem real unless they touched. If they didn't, Kame might be nothing more than a figment of his imagination.

He didn't know what to do about it, so after breakfast he had a look at his emails on Kame's laptop. Yamapi's reply made him realise his attempt at reassurance hadn't gone down very well.

"Now he thinks I've been kidnapped," Jin explained when Kame asked why he looked so exasperated. "He thinks my kidnappers forced me to type that, and that he's going to get a demand for ransom to be delivered to the base of the beanstalk. I need to talk to him."

Kame tapped the microphone. "You're too small to use the webcam, but how about this?"

After establishing that Kame didn't have Skype installed, Jin talked him through downloading the program and setting it up. Wonder of wonders, Yamapi was on-line.

"I'm going outside to pick apples," Kame said. "Will you be okay to press buttons by yourself?"

Jin waved his toothpick and waited till he heard the door close before he sent his best friend a message.

"What've you done with Jin?" came the response.

"I haven't been kidnapped," Jin said. "And if I had, why would I be contacting you on Skype?"

Pause from the other end, and then, "Jin? Why isn't there a picture?"

"Broken webcam; I've just got a microphone. I'm on someone else's laptop, Pi."

"I know that - _I'm_ on yours."

"You are?"

"Mine keeps overheating. The aircon's fixed, by the way. It's safe to come home now. I've even done the laundry."

Safe to come home? Jin sighed. That was the least of his worries. "I don't know when I'm coming home."

"Where are you? Where did you go when you came down?"

"That's just it - I'm still up here. There's a..." Jin didn't know how to describe it, or how much he ought to say. "There's someone living up here, and I can't leave him right now. He doesn't have anyone else."

"Living up the top of a beanstalk?" Yamapi sounded incredulous, but only for a second. "More magic?"

"He's got a wishing well and everything. It really works, too!"

"Then you'd better wish for a bodyguard, because your manager's spitting nails. Did you forget you've got work today?"

"I didn't forget, I just...found something better to do." Jin smiled to himself. "A lot better."

Yamapi's laughter crackled through the speakers. "You like this guy, don't you?"

"Of course I like him-"

"No," Yamapi interrupted. "I mean you _like_ him." His emphasis left no room for Jin to claim a misunderstanding.

"It doesn't matter if I do," Jin said quietly. "It can't work out, so I want to enjoy these few days while I can."

"If you're worried about other people finding out-"

"No one will ever find out! Because it's not going to happen." Misery had Jin slumping beside the microphone. "We're just not...compatible."

"If he doesn't like chilli oil I'm sure you can talk him around."

"No, I mean we're really incompatible. Physically." Jin couldn't all very well mention the height difference of over a hundred feet, so he settled for saying, "He's much bigger than me."

"Then just be very, very careful in bed, okay?"

Jin was grateful he hadn't tried to use the webcam because he didn't want Yamapi to be able to see his face right now. "I didn't mean it like _that_!"

Yamapi ignored him and proceeded to offer up every scrap of advice he'd ever learned from reading his sister's magazines, not being in a position to advise on dating men from personal experience. Jin didn't know whether to be irritated or thankful that his friend was trying so hard to help. The latter, mostly. He listened and laughed and promised to be careful, and hoped Ryo never found out about any of this.

They talked until Jin heard the door again and knew he had to wrap things up.

"I don't know what I'm going to tell everyone," he said. "I don't know how I'm going to explain my disappearance, and right now I don't care. I'll worry about it when I go back down."

"So you will be coming home?" Yamapi sounded relieved. "I don't have to start paying all the rent myself?"

"I'll come home." It pained Jin to say it, to force words out around the lump in his throat. "Soon. But not yet. I can't leave him like this."

It was more than he could do to pop into Kame's life for a few days and then disappear, leaving him without any source of human contact. Even a tiny friend had to be better than no friend at all.

The session ended with Yamapi promising to do his best to fob off all enquirers (Jin hoped he wouldn't try to push the kidnapping thing) and Jin vowing to return home before his manager hired a hit man to make sure his disappearance was permanent. By the time Kame returned, completely drenched, the speakers were silent.

"You're soaked!" Jin didn't need to speak into the microphone for Kame to hear that.

"One second the sun was shining and the next, the clouds burst," Kame said, trying to wring out his sodden T-shirt. "It only took me twenty seconds to run inside and I feel like I fell in the sea."

When Jin joked that it looked like it too, Kame flicked water at him and squelched off to change.

The rain didn't let up for two whole days after that; it wouldn't have been safe for Jin to venture down the beanstalk even if he'd felt inclined to do so. The two of them hid indoors, having fun in the kitchen (Kame had managed to pick quite a number of apples before the rain fell and the Internet was full of recipes), the games room (Kame had a whole bunch of games - mostly baseball - for his consoles, which Jin enjoyed even though he had to stand on the controllers and jump on the buttons) and the dining room (where they continued their embarrassing YouTube spree with PVs and made fun of each other's hairstyles).

In fact, they had fun everywhere except the bedroom, where Jin continued to sneak across to Kame's pillow at night despite the risk of being crushed. Kame didn't mention it until he woke up one morning to find Jin cuddling his left pinky.

"You have to stop doing this, Jin."

Jin shrugged. "I like being near you." He didn't have anything to lose by being honest, not at this point.

Kame managed to extricate his finger from Jin's grasp and leaned closer to hear him better. (He refused to set up the laptop and microphone in the bedroom.) "You still have to stop. Do you have any idea how frustrating this is for me? I can't even touch you without crushing you."

"Does that mean you want to?" Jin said hopefully. "Touch me, not crush me."

Air left Kame's lungs in a sigh so big it almost blew Jin off the pillow. "Only for the last four years or so. Not that it makes any difference if I say it now."

"It makes a difference," Jin assured him. "It makes a _big_ difference. Because it's just as frustrating for me."

When Kame didn't respond initially Jin wondered if he'd spoken loud enough. Had he overstepped the boundaries of this strange, mismatched friendship? Wasn't it kind of weird to hug your friend's finger while he slept - and even weirder that the only reason it was a finger was because anywhere else was too big to hold?

But it wasn't that Jin's words were too soft - only that they were too enormous, too significant to sink in so fast. He knew Kame understood, though, when a smile bright enough to light up the entire castle spread across his face.

That day Jin discovered there's nothing worse than to be with the person you like and know that they feel the same, and yet be unable to so much as hold hands. At least the rain had finally stopped and the castle grounds had dried up by the time they ventured outside to enjoy the afternoon sunshine. They sat on the grass, as far from the castle as they could get.

At least, Kame sat on the grass. Jin tried it for all of a minute before grabbing a handful of Kame's navy blue T-shirt and using it to climb up to his shoulder. It was easier to make himself heard from there, he reasoned.

"I think I should go," he said. "Back down to Tokyo. I'm just making things worse for you."

"Things were bad enough that I had to resort to asking a wishing well for a friend," Kame said. "Everything after that was an improvement."

"We could Skype? I'll create an account for you, then you'll still have someone to talk to. I could go tell your family you're okay-"

"I don't want you to lie to my family for me."

"It's not a lie." Jin crept closer to Kame's neck and leant against it for balance. "You're healthy, you're sane, you're-"

"-over a hundred feet tall," Kame finished for him. "I don't think they'd take it too well."

"They're your family. If they can love you when you're tiny, they can love you when you're tall." Jin didn't add the obvious ending but Kame must've inferred it because he turned his head just enough to rub his cheek against Jin's hair.

It was the first time Kame had deliberately touched him for any reason that didn't involve transport and it made his whole body feel light, filled with a giddy, intoxicating warmth, like he could bubble over at any moment and spill sheer joy all over the grass. He nuzzled back and then, daringly, pressed a kiss to Kame's cheek.

A second later, Kame's cheek wasn't there anymore.

Jin clung to the neck of the T-shirt for dear life as his seat dropped away from under him. It wasn't an earthquake, or a skyquake, or whatever the hell you called the sort of quake that rocked giant castles at the top of beanstalks. The world wasn't moving.

Kame was.

Or rather, he was shrinking. Jin couldn't even feel Kame's shoulder under him anymore; if it hadn't been for his grip on the T-shirt he'd be splattered on the ground by now. He had to close his eyes, couldn't handle the dizzying speed at which the grass was coming up to meet him. All he could do was hang on and wait for everything to stop.

He landed hard, but not where he'd expected. Grass didn't generally cry out in pain. He opened his eyes to find himself sprawled across Kame's lap, still clutching his T-shirt.

"You didn't feel this heavy a couple of minutes ago," Kame said, grimacing. Hearing his voice at normal volume threw Jin for a loop. "I shouldn't have kept giving you second helpings."

Jin uncurled stiff fingers to release Kame's shirt and wished his head would catch up with the world. It still felt like he was falling. He struggled to right himself but only succeeded in bruising his stomach on Kame's knee.

"Stop wriggling before one of us loses something important."

"You're...you're..." Jin couldn't even get the words out.

"Yeah, I am." Kame broke into a grin and managed to get one hand - one normal, human-sized hand - on Jin's waist to help him sit up without doing himself an injury. "The second you kissed me. I guess the well just took a really long time to grant that particular wish."

Jin managed to struggle into a sitting position, conscious of the fact that he was still on Kame's legs and Kame still had a hand on his waist and didn't seem to be in any rush to remove it. Truth be told, Jin didn't want him to, either. The giant he'd befriended had shrunk down to become much more accessible, less myth and more man, with short, stubby fingers and a sprinkling of tiny moles. He'd become someone Jin could touch normally...and someone who could touch _him_ without having to hold back.

If Kame still wanted to, of course. Jin leaned forwards just as Kame's other hand slid up his back, coming to rest below his shoulderblades and nudging him closer with light but persistent pressure. He gave in, willingly. Kame met him in the middle, excitement in his eyes and welcome warm on his lips that had Jin forgetting about how he'd never actually taken his possible interest in guys beyond the theoretical stage before. It wasn't that different, really, if you didn't count the tickle of stubble, or the way Kame sounded when he moaned low and deep into Jin's mouth. Jin felt himself stirring in response after days of being driven to the edge of frustration.

He broke away, breathless, when a blade of grass brushed his back and he realised they were still outdoors - and with Kame now back to his own size, the castle was a long way off. But they didn't have to return, did they?

"Don't look at it," Kame murmured. "We're never going back there." He rested his forehead against Jin's, blocking his view of the castle. "We're going to climb down that beanstalk and give the press a heart attack."

Having had several unpleasant encounters with the media, Jin wasn't averse to this. But that didn't mean he was in any rush to embark on the long journey home. Once they were back in Tokyo, he'd have his work cut out for him to keep his manager from killing him while Kame would be caught up in a whirlwind of activity, trying to get his life back on track. Going home meant everything had to change, that the idyllic bubble containing the past few days would pop and deposit them both on the cold, hard floor of reality where Kamenashi Kazuya and Akanishi Jin walked in parallel worlds, always within sight but never within reach.

Not that they'd ever make it anywhere near the beanstalk if Kame didn't let go. He slid one hand under Jin's shirt, skimming lightly over his lower back, and Jin jumped as a nail scraped his skin.

"Sorry," Kame said, smoothing the scrape with gentle fingers. "It just feels so good to be able to touch you without worrying that I'll accidentally crush you."

"I'm not a china doll."

"I know, I know." Kame planted apologetic kisses down Jin's cheek and the side of his neck, ghosting his lips over the exposed collarbone and withdrawing in alarm when Jin yelped and tried to squirm away.

"It tickles," he explained, crossing his arms over his collarbones in case Kame got any funny ideas. "Isn't it ticklish for you?"

"Not really..."

By way of revenge Jin tried a tentative tickle attack but if Kame had vulnerable spots he didn't find them, not that this stopped either of them from laughing like a pair of giddy schoolchildren playing on the beach. He relished being able to get his arms around more of Kame than his little finger; for both of them being cooped up indoors knowing full well that they were attracted to each other but being unable to do anything about it meant that now they could touch, they were in no rush to stop.

The hand under Jin's shirt worked its way along his ribcage; the other roamed anywhere it could reach, doing everything possible to press them closer together as if they were still too far apart. Deciding it was safe to leave his collarbones unguarded Jin did the same, threading his fingers through Kame's sun-warmed hair as they kissed, their lips still sweet from caramel sauce and tongues eager to explore.

He lost track of how long they sat in the grass like that. There seemed to be no end of things to learn about each other, like how Kame loved it when Jin nibbled gently at his pierced ear, or how appreciative Jin could be when Kame kneaded his back in an amateur - but enthusiastic - attempt at a massage.

It was only when the sun vanished briefly behind a cloud that Jin remembered they were outdoors - an unusual state of affairs, given that he normally couldn't kiss anyone in public unless it was for work. He recalled the glinting eyes in the long grass and shivered.

Kame drew back enough to meet his eyes. "Something wrong?"

"Just wondering about the giant insects."

"They won't bother us," Kame said dismissively. "Besides, we'll see them coming."

"I'm more worried that's what they'll see _us_ doing, actually..."

That earned him a tap on the back of the head and a smirk from Kame. "You do a song like _Lovejuice_ and get embarrassed because a couple of oversized insects _might_ be watching us make out?"

"It's about a cocktail!"

"Oh, is that what they're calling it these days? I must be more out of touch than I thought."

Jin resigned himself to being misunderstood for the rest of his life.

"But my legs are going to sleep anyway," Kame said, "so how about we move? The grass will keep us covered. Like this."

He nudged Jin's hip to make him roll off his legs, then pulled him down so they ended up lying next to each other in the long grass, sheltered from prying eyes.

"How are your legs?" Jin asked.

"Numb, thanks to you." Kame clearly didn't hold a grudge, and didn't complain when Jin began to massage life back into his legs, beginning at the ankles and working his way steadily upwards.

When he reached mid-thigh he stopped, uncertain.

"It's okay to keep going," Kame said, squeezing Jin's hip by way of encouragement. "Isn't it?"

The rational part of Jin's brain, which was currently being overwhelmed by the rest of it, pointed out that he couldn't ask for a better first time with a guy than with someone he'd actually had a crush on for years and had already seen naked, even if they were outdoors and therefore totally screwed if the rain came back.

"Yeah." Jin swallowed hard. "It's okay."

It was, he discovered, more than okay when Kame proved just as adventurous exploring below the belt as above it, still eager to lay hands on as much of Jin as he could. It took them a while to coordinate, because Jin was a little clumsy and Kame was a little impatient and hands and elbows went everywhere, but they managed not to inflict any major damage on each other.

Kame had obviously done this before; didn't hesitate for a second once he had Jin's jeans and underwear bunched around his thighs. Jin hadn't - not with guys, and he didn't think his experience with girls would be of much use. Although very pretty, Kame was no girl, as Jin had seen firsthand. But he knew what he liked for himself, at least, so he tried it out on Kame in the hopes that what worked for one guy would work reasonably well for another.

It was hard to concentrate, though, when Kame's hands stroked and squeezed and teased in ways that made Jin's brain stop in its tracks, momentarily overwhelmed by how good it felt. He lay back, stunned and panting; Kame laughed and kissed him again, stealing his remaining breath in the sweetest possible manner.

"See? No giant insects, Jin."

"They're probably just hiding and enjoying the free show," Jin muttered.

"I don't care if they're enjoying it as long as _we're_ enjoying it."

There were no worries on that score. Kame had one leg between Jin's, crawled half atop him to maximise the contact between them. That made the angles more awkward than ever but Jin didn't mind. He didn't even care if they never got to do this again after they returned to Tokyo because it felt like he was about to expire from pleasure on the spot. He rolled his hips up to meet Kame - all that dance practice had to come in handy for something - and found no shortage of friction waiting for him. It didn't take much to finish him off; Kame's clever fingers stroked him just right and he arched his back towards the sky, coming down with slow, unsteady breaths and melted bones.

Kame wiped his sticky hand on the grass; with the other he stroked Jin's hair until his eyes refocused and his mind recovered enough to remember he wasn't the only person involved. Determined to make Kame feel equally undone, Jin wrapped one arm around his waist to hold him still and set to work wih his free hand until Kame and coherency were barely on speaking terms, the sounds emanating from his throat bearing no resemblance whatsoever to real words until he came with Jin's name on his lips, which made Jin feel sort of proud.

They didn't move for a while, cuddled together on the grass with no real energy now all the tension from the past few days had been released. Rebuttoning jeans was about as far as they got until Kame suggested, without much enthusiasm, that they should consider starting on the beanstalk if they were going to reach Tokyo before night fell.

"I'm not sure I can climb down without falling right now," Jin confessed. "And I'm too comfortable to move."

"You've got my elbow in your spleen and you're comfortable?"

With considerable effort, Jin shrugged. "It's not like I need my spleen for anything."

Kame kissed him on the forehead and pushed himself up on one elbow. "All those fansites saying you were M were right, then."

"You looked me up on the Internet?"

It was Kame's turn to shrug. "I've been up here a long time. Which is why the sooner we get back down, the happier I'll be."

Reluctantly, Jin rose to his feet, stretching out heavy limbs in preparation for the long climb down. He brushed dirt off his jeans and groaned.

"If you're that worn out, I guess we could always stay one last night in the castle and climb down tomorrow," Kame said.

"It's not that." Jin patted his empty pockets. "We'd have to return to the castle anyway. I left my phone in your dining room!"


End file.
